Nvidia launches Tesla GPUs

MUMBAI, INDIA: Nvidia Corporation unveiled the Tesla 20-series of parallel processors for the high performance computing (HPC) market, based on its new generation CUDA processor architecture, codenamed ‘Fermi’.

Designed from the ground-up for parallel computing, the NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs slash the cost of computing by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster at one-tenth the cost and one-twentieth the power.

“Nvidia has deployed a highly attractive architecture in Fermi, with a feature set that opens the technology up to the entire computing industry,” said Jack Dongarra, director—Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee.

At their core, Tesla GPUs are based on the massively parallel CUDA computing architecture that offers developers a parallel computing model that is easier to understand and program than any of the alternatives developed over the last 50 years.

"There can be no doubt that the future of computing is parallel processing, and it is vital that computer science students get a solid grounding in how to program new parallel architectures," said Wen-mei Hwu, professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"GPUs and the CUDA programming model enable students to quickly understand parallel programming concepts and immediately get transformative speed increases," he concluded.